A few minutes ago I switched to C-SPAN, to see whether they had any coverage of the Republican convention or the hooha surrounding it. The regular news channels are all going on about the random crap they spend so much time on. CNN is talking about Paul Hamm, Fox News is talking about Elian Gonzalez of all things, and MSNBC has, of course, Don Imus in a stupid hat. C-SPAN 2 has Ralph Nader talking in a monotone about the need to tax financial ‘speculation’.

But when I changed channels, this screen popped up on the DirecTV TiVo:

That’s right. DirecTV’s system thinks that ‘Washington Journal’ is a pay-per-view show worth $3.99.

Obviously someone has screwed up somewhere, but this really shouldn’t happen. I pay these jokers at DirecTV $50 a month for TV service; I don’t think it’s asking too much that they’d have some safeguards in place to prevent this — or at least that they’d hire people who know, without any ‘safeguards’, that freaking C-SPAN is not a pay-per-view channel. Idiots.